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title = "JRR Tolkien's Men of Middle Earth"
date = 2021-02-15
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Another language rant
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Whether intentional or not, JRR Tolkien used the assumption that \"men\"
means all humans to add a twist to the battle between Éowyn (and Merry)
and the Witch-King. The fight itself pays homage to the battle where
Beowulf and Wiglaf fight the dragon. In both cases, just when our main
protagonist needs an ounce of extra edge over the evil foe, the
sidekick, to wacks them from behind.

Side note, Tolkien loved Beowulf. He also reuses an earlier part of the
story with the dragon for the Hobbit. Bilbo gets to play the hoard
burglar who wakes the wyrm. In Beowulf, that takes place in exposition,
but Tolkien must have known what he was borrowing, like he did
everything else.

Other side note. When I heard a contemporary commentary about \"Men of
Middle Earth\" and repeatedly call the humans \"men\" it drives me a
little nuts. This isn\'t some Twilight Zone episode where the main folks
in the story turn out to be monsters or androids. We can just safely
assume those beings are human.

So was it clever? I assume enough folks when they read \"No living man
may hinder me\" assumed the Witch-King invincible. From here we can
venture deeper into pop culture at the \"shock\" of Samus Aran removing
her helmet or back to Macbeth \"none of woman born / Shall harm
Macbeth\". Macduff is just an earlier iteration of the same punch line,
or in his case probably a stab or a slash. Obviously Tolkien must have
known about Willy Shaxpier, and I think it also apparent that most folks
agree that in English the word \"man\" means male human. Otherwise these
plays on words, the jokes, are no big deal. So now we\'ve achieved this
dual meaning for the word, where many folks are apparently surprised by
something we should have already known.

To a lesser detriment of social interaction, I could also see how these
equivocations could apply to other words such as day (for the
Earch-cycle), day for the daylight hours, and night for the non-daylight
hours. Such a punchline along with exclusionary social practices escapes
me, but leave it to some comedian to come up with one the day before I
post this.

In the past I have suggested we deprecate almost all instances of the
word \"man\" from English when used to mean a person, folk, actor, etc.
Let woman, human, man as well as gender-indicators (do we have a word
for it?) such as \"fireman\" (I think the comic books will have a ways
to go on this too, but we can Wiglaf them in the foot later) go down
into the history books and stay there along with Shuckspeer and the
Canterbury Tales. We\'ll figure it out when we re-read them.

Okay maybe I lied. The other side note is definitely the main reason for
this rant. I haven\'t even discussed any of the possible harm. Tolkien
must have known about women\'s suffrage. He wasn\'t an idiot and he
definitely got out. I don\'t believe in an in-universe reason. Remove
the joke and the dual meaning and there\'s really no other reason than
bad habits.
